The legacy of Mohammad Salman Hamdani is filled with both acknowledgments and overt slights, demonstrating how an individual’s religious and cultural identity can obscure their heroism in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

 

Hamdani, a Pakistani-American who spent almost his entire life growing up in New York City, was a young police cadet who died in the World Trade Center trying to save those trapped in the north tower.

 

Following his death, the city’s police department buried him with full honors, while the police commissioner and Mayor Michael Bloomberg labeled Hamdani a hero.

 

And yet his name does not appear on the list of fallen first responders at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, nor is it on the list of victims who died in the building.

 

“Instead, his name appears on the memorial’s last panel for World Trade Center victims, next to a blank space along the south tower perimeter, with the names of others who did not fit into the categories the memorial created to give placements meaning. That section is for those who had only a loose connection, or none, to the World Trade Center,” wrote Sharon Otterman in The New York Times. Because he was only a cadet—the equivalent of a paid intern—he did not qualify for the section for police, and there is no section for unaffiliated volunteers, who are classified as informal rescue workers.

 

For a time after the attacks, Hamdani was considered a possible suspect by police, based on the fact he was Muslim, had roots in Pakistan and studied biochemistry. Investigators eventually stopped looking for ways to tie him to the terrorism, while his family wonders why their son has not been treated the same as other heroes of 9/11.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Obscuring a Muslim Name, and an American’s Sacrifice (by Sharon Otterman, New York Times)